Chapter Text
And so the gods battled and set the world to this tune;
For every life given, misfortune will be here to take us, too.So remember this, because it's all you really need to do—
That this is our place, just don't let it get to you.
Iwaizumi Hajime is five when his mother sits down and explains it the first time. It is summer and the porch door has been thrown wide open, cicadas sizzling in the damp summer air, and he gets the sense that it's going to rain because he can always smell it in the air like something's burning. His mother, on the other side of the table, is still wearing the small black bracelet to signify the loss of a loved one, and tugs at the string impatiently like she wants to tear it off altogether. Hajime itches at his, wonders why he has to wear twine of all things, and decides to ultimately leave it alone for later.
"What are we waiting for?" Hajime asks her, indignant. He had promised to play with the strange new boy who just moved three houses down from his, and the rain would certainly put a damper on things. He hears thunder, counts each rumble like a second hand on a clock, and feels something reverberate in his bones. Hajime wonders if he's getting a stomachache. His mother stares on, eyes vacant but flicking up in something lively from time to time.
"Your father. He should be coming back any minute now," Hajime's mother says. She sounds like she's just run a long race, breathless.
"Oh? From his trip to Kyoto, then?" Hajime asks, brightening up. His father had been gone for a week now, simply for what his mother pens as out-of-town-business. This is the first time Hajime's ever had to live without him around, and he was starting to get antsy about things, so he's glad he'll be back soon.
"Oh, Hajime. We have some things to explain to you when he gets here," his mother sighs, a semblance of a smile coming back on her lips. Maybe she's just won her imaginary race, Hajime thinks.
"What things?" he asks.
"The world as you know it."
Hajime's father returns soon after that, coming through the front door wearing a black suit and a tie to match. Hajime blinks up, breath sucked in, because he's never seen him dressed like this. He smiles, looks down at his wife's wrists, and she takes off the mourning bracelet in turn.
"Where have you been, dad?" Hajime asks, rising from the table. He comes over, relieved, it seems, and bends down to face his son at eye level. He takes Hajime's hand (to which Hajime just laughs a little) and unties the thread around his wrist, wrapping the twine around his fingers and putting it into his pocket for safekeeping. He stares back to his wife, who gives a nod of approval, and then back at Hajime, who feels the strange need to take a deep breath again. Outside, the rain officially starts to pour. Thunder sounds in low echoes.
"I was dead, Hajime," his father says in a whisper, voice almost lost under the storm. "and your mother and I want to tell you that it will happen to you, too."
"What?"
Hajime lowers himself back onto the floor. Tears stinging at his eyes but never falling, because death is not something for children, he nods along when his parents tell about his twenty-five lives, and how he has to be careful not to lose them too fast, or too hard.
He rubs at his eyes when his father tells him to be strong. Hajime feels the strong urge to salute when he makes himself stand again. His mother recites the motto for the first time, which he tells himself to seal into his heart, steady and true.
And so the gods battled and set the world to this tune;
For every life given, misfortune will be here to take us, too.
Hajime repeats the lines. He loses himself momentarily, when the first flash of storm's light blinks in the overcast.
Down the street, a golden boy in the making loses his first life to lightning, of all things, out of all the odds, when he tries to climb a high tree in front of his house.
So remember this, because it's all you really need to do—
That this is our place, just don't let it get to you.
The dying boy smiles with each semi-last word on his tongue.
"I wanted to prove something."
The golden boy to be feels his older sister take his hand, softly, solemnly, for she doesn't have that many lives to begin with, either.
"And what was that, Tooru?" she asks, streaming her fingers through his hair in comfort.
Oikawa doesn’t move, but the muscles on his face stretch into something even more brilliant than before.
"That I could reach the sky, too."
x
For a game of show and tell under the stars, Hajime just wants to point out the brightest star he can find, shut his lips sealed, and say nothing else. He is worn from a day of play, but Oikawa Tooru is the chatty kind, high-pitched and all sorts of terribly excited, and Hajime doesn't feel like losing.
"Oh, well, I really like aliens! And milk flavored things. And fresh crayons. And the cookies my sister bakes!"
Hajime sighs when he has to take his turn. "I like catching bugs and band aids with trucks on him. I also like cookies, but not if they're too sweet, and long baths."
"Ew, Iwa-chan."
"What?"
"Bugs are dirty."
"I think they're cool."
Oikawa sits up in the grass, laughs in teasing, and helps Hajime up, too. The two of them stare ahead, right back to night-lit houses, just meters away on the smallest slope of land. Hajime wonders if this means he's going to be spending a lot of days with Oikawa like this, just talking nonsense in the dark. He wouldn't mind it if the other boy didn't whine so much.
"Well, I'll put up with the bugs," Oikawa says.
Hajime turns to face him. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." There's a giggle with his assertions.
"And why's that?"
"Because that's what friends do, Iwa-chan!"
Hajime guesses he likes the sound of that.
x
"Hajime, I'd like to talk to you about something," his mother tells him during dinner one night, when Hajime just wants to dig in after a day of playing with the boy three houses down from him.
"About what?"
"Your friend Tooru-kun."
Hajime puts down his fish along with a pair of chopsticks, wipes his grubby hands in his lap, and frowns up at the name.
"Him?" Tooru? Oikawa Tooru, who smiles bright and bathes in the sun too much? Who constantly demands held hands and only the shiniest bugs in the batch? Antsy, dancing, high-flying Oikawa Tooru, who’s taught Hajime the finer points of a well-placed frown? Oikawa Tooru. The other neighborhood kids call him lightning boy. Grannies call him something golden. Hajime just thinks he’s a nuisance, but not one to be avoided; he knows Oikawa isn't a bad kid, not by any stretch of the imagination, and with this he wonders why his mother has taken on such a grave tone about Oikawa Tooru.
"Yes, him."
"What's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing, but—well, you see, he's an odd sort of boy."
"Hm. Yeah, he always eats the only popsicles in the house, even when I tell him I want the last one," Hajime can't help but go on; it's a real issue, and one he'll have to reprimand Oikawa for later.
"Ah, well, I don't mean that, Hajime."
"Then?"
"Has Tooru-kun ever told you about his number?"
Hajime shakes his head. "I never asked."
"Well, this is very important." His mother comes from the other side of the table, kneels down by Hajime's seat, and takes his hands into her hers. "I just found this out myself, but Tooru-kun only has nine lives, Hajime."
"Like a cat?"
She laughs wearily. "I guess you could say that. My point is, I would like you to treat him well. Be kind."
"I can't promise I'll always be nice," Hajime tells his mother honestly. "He can get really annoying if I don't tell him to shut up."
"Hajime," His mother scolds.
"But...why wouldn't I be good to him, anyway?" Hajime asks, blinking. "He's my friend."
"Ah, well, yes." His mother looks surprised. "Your friend."
"Do lives matter that much if he's special to me, mom?"
Getting up, his mother smiles like she's a little girl herself, springing with something splendid in her step, and pats her son extra affectionately on the way up. Hajime just stares at her, confused, and wonders why adults are bent on making things so complicated all the time.
"No, I guess they don't, huh?" she asks.
"I don't think they do." Hajime says simply. Maybe there are things he just doesn't understand yet. "Oikawa is my friend! It wouldn't matter if he only had one, or a billion and five!"
Hajime's mother holds onto his hand, pressing a small kiss on the back of it for safekeeping and all the world's good fortune.
"You're a lovely boy, Hajime."
x
For the next year after Oikawa Tooru’s first death, his mother makes him stay inside during rainy days, resigning him to reruns of Tikachu and various documentaries on aliens, which Hajime, reluctantly, but usually stays with him for. There's snacks, sometimes, a bit of tea if his mom's brewed a fresh pot, but most of the time Oikawa is too busy making a fuss to enjoy any of it. Hajime doesn't really mind though, because Oikawa is surprisingly quiet about his sniffs and hiccups. It's almost fascinating, really; because for all the times he has run with Oikawa in the sun, hands clasped and avoiding pitfalls and life’s other dangers, Hajime has always found the most life with his friend like this, in the solace of shared blankets.
“I want to go outside, Iwa-chan," Oikawa, half-asleep and just finished crying, leans against Hajime’s back and starts up again, snot-nosed and probably ugly, if the other boy could just get a look at him past the dark. “It’s not fair that I always have to stay inside. I want to jump in puddles.”
Hajime grunts out a sigh. “It’s not all the time. Just during storms. You died in the rain last time, and your mom gets worried.”
“I’m not always going to die in the rain," Oikawa pouts.
“She doesn’t want you dying at all, dummy.” Hajime has built up a habit of flicking Oikawa on the head, sharp enough to elicit an ‘ow,’ but not hard enough to cause any real damage. Oikawa gives up a laugh at this, yelping from the tears he still hasn’t finished spilling, but still showing his real smile nonetheless. Hajime grins in the darkness of the room too, because this is what he means by seeing the real Oikawa, by finding the most life; for all the pretty bravado he puts on with the unsuspecting adults, all to get extra candy or pocket money, the dawdling toes, the thin-lipped smiles, Oikawa Tooru is best seen in all honesty, without the sham of an impromptu show.
“Ninekawa," Hajime calls after him, almost with affection. He thinks the sound of his voice sounds gross leaving off his lips, but Oikawa just nuzzles into Hajime’s shoulder a little closer, puffing out breathy laughter against his shoulder.
“Hey, Iwa-chan. Don’t you think it’s weird, being friends with me?” Oikawa asks out the silence, when they’re both lying on the rug on their backs and letting another documentary run by on mute.
“Why? Because all you do is watch alien shows?” Hajime jokes. “Or because of those ugly purple pajama pants you wear at night?”
Oikawa attempts to kick Hajime from across the floor, but Hajime dodges without too much of a problem.
“I’m serious, Iwa-chan.”
“Okay," Hajime says. “Why is it weird?” he asks next, humoring Oikawa with rolling eyes, but he knows to back down when the other boy is serious about this. Hajime has to respect all things serious, especially if it's him. With a huff of breath, strong in exhale but scared of the other side, of all their imminent deaths, of whatever Oikawa wants to ask next, Hajime musters the most severe sort of calm a kid can.
"What's wrong?" Hajime approaches in a whisper, just as Oikawa's flicker up in fear, in a way that says he never wants to speak again.
"Nevermind!" Oikawa mashes his lips closed.
"You started it. Now I want to know."
"No!"
"But it bothers you."
Oikawa opens his mouth to speak and finds no words, so Hajime just waits for him to reclaim them.
"What if I run out of lives before you?" Oikawa blurts out. "Why would you be friends with someone with just nine lives?"
Hajime feels a lump drop, deep from the cliffs of his throat and into the pit of his queasy stomach. He kind of wants to laugh.
"Because you're not just my friend, stupid," Hajime plasters another smile on his face, incredulous, dumbfounded that Oikawa would ask this, dumbfounded that he's actually getting upset about this, too.
"Iwa-chan?" Oikawa gulps down his own shakiness. "Are you crying?"
"No."
"Iwa-chan!"
Hajime muffles his answer against the bunched-up cloth of his blanket and shuts his eyes to the eerie television glow of the room. He pretends it is a bonfire, warm and steady.
‘I think you're my best friend, you idiot,’ Hajime mumbles again, honest to the point where he feels like his chest is opening up to something gaping and exposed.
You're my best friend.
Whether you've got a billion and five lives, whether you've got nine, whether you've got one.
Whether you've got no time left at all.
You're my best friend, Oikawa Tooru.
Of course, these are things a six year old’s mind can barely accentuate, and Hajime can barely believe he’s forming the thoughts at all, but he knows they’re real. He knows it from the way he doesn’t shout at Oikawa just this once for taking his hand when he least expects it.
He knows from the way he falls asleep on Oikawa’s floor, dreamless but wishing for better days to come.
x
The next morning, Oikawa’s mother approaches Hajime with a request. He wonders if mothers are naturally drawn to him.
“Will you look after my son, Hajime-kun?” She asks.
“Oh, um. Sure, I guess.”
Her smile is just like her son’s, something breezy and slightly insincere, before he watches it blossom into all-encompassment. Hajime takes notice of the way it falls after a second though, worn and weakened from years of limited lives and premature burials. Feeling his stomach drop again, Hajime swallows, stiffens up, and hopes that her son's smiles never fade that fast.
"Thank you, my dear boy."
Hajime nods.
"Iwa-chan?" Oikawa comes stumbling into the room, eyes still puffy and red from crying last night.
Hajime scowls for something he can't place, eats up the soreness in his own chest, and puts on a brave face for the new day. He hops from his place at the table, blinks twice at Oikawa's mother, and yanks the other Oikawa by the firm grip of a hand, pulling him towards the backyard to play.
x
Oikawa Tooru is seven, deathless for the past two years, and positively stunned that his best friend would have more lives than him.
"I really don't get it," Oikawa says to Hajime as he presses a Tikachu band-aid over his right knee, one to match the dinosaur one on his left. Hajime just scowls at him, but admits that he's right on some strange cosmic level, because Oikawa Tooru always keeps himself pristine and untouched and well-deserving of a thousand lives. Hajime, with his hands in the dirt and skin covered in bandaids, looks more like hell, the picture of a nine-lifer on a regular basis.
But, no—this is what Oikawa is. Nine lives. No more, and soon to be less. Hajime wonders if the gods think they're funny. They're probably laughing right now.
"Well, have you died lately?" Hajime asks Oikawa, taking the time to lace up his shoes. He's a bit wary to keep them unattended after his cousin's first death tripping down the stairs a week ago, and he thinks he could do without the fall, too. Looking over at Oikawa's sneakers, he sees he's left them untied, just ready for a second death, but he doesn't seem to care. Oikawa's bare heels lift out of his perfectly white sneakers, like he's ready to ascend right then and there out of something unfettered.
"Oi, tie your shoes, stupid," Hajime quips, lips pursed. Oikawa doesn't seem to hear him, more concerned with the bunch of older kids playing ball at the other end of the park lane. Volleyball? Something else? No, it's certainly volleyball. Either way, if Oikawa is about to go running off to join them, like Hajime suspects he will, he should at least dash off in tied shoes. But just as he's about to tie them for his best friend, this silly boy with only nine lives, a number that people in their sixties normally have, Hajime gets the grand idea that Oikawa should learn to take care of himself, too.
"Iwa-chan, let's go play with them! Please?" Oikawa asks, with a pout of his lips. Hajime resists the urge to flick him on the head right then and there. He is not here for any of Oikawa's sweet-faced schemes.
"No."
"I'm saying please, though!" Oikawa pleads, like he's using the world's most valuable currency.
Hajime sighs, seven going on thirty-nine. "I don't know, your mom did tell me to look after you, and I'm not sure that's the way to go." Hajime looks over at the court with something lingering, because he's certainly intrigued too, but hides it away for their both sakes.
"Please," Oikawa actually begs, the exact opposite of that, clasping his hands together. "I promise I'll be careful, Iwa-chan."
"No."
"Iwaaaa-chan."
Hajime scowls down at Oikawa's feet. "Tell you what? I'm not budging until you tie your shoes. And I'm not gonna tie them for you."
Petulant, Oikawa groans and gets down on one knee, ties his shoes, and waves his hands at the half-hearted job. With this, Hajime relents (mostly because he's curious about how the ball flies over the net, too) and follows Oikawa onto the court, too. The older kids don't let either of them play, and Oikawa gets them into further trouble by teasing another boy for his big ears. Hajime and Oikawa end up on the asphalt for that, bleeding and bruised and scuffed up, but neither of them can claim death this time, fortunately.
Wiping the blood from his nose, Oikawa watches how uncoordinated the other children are with the ball, how graceless their endeavors are.
"We can do better than that," he says, without teasing.
Hajime really gets a look at him. Sometimes Oikawa gets this look in his face like he wants to dance and fight someone at the same instance.
"Hm." Hajime isn't sure about the dancing part, but he can count himself in for the fight. "I guess we'll have to show them, huh?"
Getting up, Oikawa's toes lift off the ground and his eyes fly wide open, like he's seeing the world for the first time—flashing interest blooming into something more.
The first time, it was aliens.
For this first time, it is volleyball, his world just one spinning ball like a globe on its axis, and Oikawa is examining each stitch on its surface like a new country to be conquered. Hajime watches the game unfold, the way hands meet the ball in a jump serve, powerful and bold and real, unlike the aliens in Oikawa’s favorite stories, and Hajime must admit he enjoys the tangibility of it all, too.
“Don’t you think it’s amazing, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks, breathless, still watching.
“Yeah,” Hajime answers conservatively, although it’s hard to get excited, too.
So because he never quite liked aliens anyway, Hajime decides to follow Oikawa Tooru into this new world. By nightfall, the two of them have drudged up enough pocket change to buy their first volleyball.
(And when they connect, all clumsy forearms and dull thuds of slapping palms, Hajime feels like he’ll be with Oikawa for the long run—nine lives be damned.)
x
By the time Iwaizumi Hajime is about to die for the first time, he is almost ten and it is nothing cool like the strike of lightning. He is bedridden, suffering from a severe, severe bout of this season's flu, right on the precipice of his tenth summer, and he knows his days are numbered. His mother comes in everyday with a flu mask of her own and a tray of all Hajime's favorite foods, but he feels too sick to even move his soup spoon. He props himself up in bed when Oikawa comes to visit though, who's wearing a flu mask of his own and presenting a volleyball for the two of them to practice with today.
"I can't believe your mom let you over here," Hajime groans out. "The doctor says I should be dead within two days. I'm contagious." He coughs a little, feels a sea of something flushed rise up all over his body, and sinks further into his mattress.
"Well, it's not fun being by yourself for this stuff," Oikawa muses, not exactly sad, but definitely more reserved than usual.
"I'd rather be alone. This isn't exactly the best way to go."
Oikawa laughs. "You're going to die from a snot overload."
"I'll kill you," Hajime tells him with little conviction, frankly too dejected to do much else. He hates to admit this, but he wishes he'd die a cooler death than the flu, because it's not exactly something to brag about. The other kids in class who have had their firsts usually boast about falling into rivers or getting hit by speeding cars; Oikawa, the stupid boy wonder, had gotten hit by lightning, of all things. But of course Hajime's first death would come by the ways of a high fever and sneeze attacks. How unspectacular. Hajime sighs about it and faces away from Oikawa about this, too weak to actually punch him today.
"Aw, don't bring me down to eight, now," Oikawa pouts. "I've still got a whole volleyball career ahead of me."
"Whatever, Ninekawa," Hajime huffs out. "Why don't you go back to practicing, then, instead of wasting your time here?"
Oikawa looks perplexed by the question. "Because it's not fun being sick. Having me around makes being bedridden seven thousand, six-hundred and fifty-nine times better!"
"That's random."
"I thought it'd make things more interesting."
"I didn't even know you could count that high," Hajime jokes, and Oikawa looks completely offended. Still, they both break into laughter, one full of life despite the lack of it, and one on the verge of dying altogether.
"You'll be okay for next week's game, right?" Oikawa asks. It's the first time he'll be starting as a setter, and even in his haze, Hajime knows how important this is to him. Besides, he's been designated the ace, too, whatever that means for an boy in elementary school, and he's itching to get out there all the same.
"Of course," Hajime smirks from his pillow.
"Okay." Oikawa is satisfied with the answer. "Say, Iwa-chan, can I tell you stories? It'll help the time pass faster."
Hajime nods, feeling heavy, head hazy from fever.
"Do whatever you want."
Hajime falls asleep to the sound of Oikawa's muffled voice, of tales through told through his flu mask. Half dreaming, he hears of Oikawa's ancestors, of warlords and overzealous businessmen, all of them too young and bright and moving too fast to leave leftover lives for their next of kin. Hajime thinks about how wretched that is. Oikawa just hopes he can live up to their towering heights.
And just when he's about to die, the first out of his twenty-fifth, Hajime opens his eyes once more, lets Oikawa be the last sight he sees, and lets himself drift into the clouds, like he’s been lifted.
x
Hajime thinks the void smells of air salonpas.
On the other side, Oikawa braids together a mourning bracelet.
x
Hajime returns to earth three days after his first death, wearing a smart black suit and shiny dress shoes. Any cloudiness from his flu has rescinded into absolute clarity, like the gods themselves have treated him, and Hajime suddenly feels like he can run a thousand miles. So that's what he does, kick off his shoes and run, away from his reappearance point, under a high-hanging birdhouse in his grandmother's flower garden. His mother, gasping, chases after him down the street, calls of 'Hajime!' caught happily in her throat.
Two hours after coming back from the dead, Hajime laces up his gym shoes and practices with the grade school team. The other kids ask him what death feels like, but Hajime really doesn’t think much of it. To him, it feels like falling asleep, just a little deeper than usual.
His eyes meet Oikawa’s from across the room, where he’s serving for the other practice team today.
With the most graceful jump serve he’s seen all day, graceful as any grade schooler can get, Hajime knows Oikawa is telling him, ‘welcome back.’
Hajime finds a bracelet of twine on the club room floor later, obviously picked at from time to time. He picks it up, tosses it into the trash, and pretends it didn't belong to Oikawa.
x
Oikawa starts his tenure at Kitagawa Daiichi Middle School with a lie, written cleanly on a piece of survey paper. Hajime looks at the question again, just to make sure he’s read it right, but when he knows there’s no way he’s actually mistaken, he takes Oikawa’s questionnaire into his possession and comes to the verge of ripping it right in half. Pinching the page in between his fingers, Hajime looks at the number again, a daring forty-five, and almost scoffs.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Hajime turns to Oikawa, who’s taken to innocently tying his shoe on the ground. He’s gotten good at that the past couple of years, never leaving his shoes untied, but this blatant lie of forty-five is more than enough to make Hajime forget smaller victories like neatly laced sneakers.
“Isn’t it funny, Iwa-chan? How no one ever really checks your number? You can just make things up.” Oikawa laughs, a little too pleasantly. There’s too much of a hum in his voice, and Hajime hates the false breeze that comes out of his feints.
“Lying is a horrible idea," Hajime says.
Oikawa shrugs, zipping up his gym bag slinging it over his shoulder. “I do what I have to do. No one’s going to let me on a team if I tell them I’ve only got nine lives.” He doesn’t shrink when he says the number this time, because it’s just him and Hajime outside the second gymnasium this afternoon, but he usually keeps the number quiet aside from close friends and family.
"Oikawa."
"What, Iwa-chan?" Oikawa turns back to face him, smile wide and pleasant. It pisses Hajime off to no end, just how well he switches to these facades of his. "Are you gonna tell me not to join, too? I'm not made of glass, you know."
Hajime clenches his fists in his pockets and resists the urge to tell him off altogether. "Listen, I know as well as anyone that you want to play, because I want to, too. But...just.” He hates putting this into words. He hates feeling the lump form in the back of his throat. Hajime sighs. Consider the fact that accidents happen. Just consider the fact that you only have nine lives.
“Just don’t get yourself in too much trouble," Hajime manages to say.
“Trouble follows trouble," Oikawa says with a tiny smirk. He picks up something pleasant along the way and leans his head up towards the mid spring sun, effortless and free, but Hajime can tell he’s irritated from the way his eyes squint up and somehow find a way to glaze over.
“Iwa-chan.”
Hajime finds this call of Iwa-chan even more annoying than usual. Getting up from the grass and hearing a third-year call for the both of them from inside the gym, he thinks it’s better than trying to get through Oikawa Tooru’s thick skull. Let him sulk outside, in all his plastered smiles and feigned graces.
Oikawa reaches onto Hajime’s wrist, digging into his skin with shaking fingers. He’s no longer looking up at the sun, but at the grass below, head hung low. Hajime hates seeing this more than the shows he usually puts on.
“Yes?” Hajime asks, softening. Oikawa lets his grasp fall and presses his palm into his other, sounding a light smack that makes Hajime nearly jump in place.
“Please don't start pitying me, too," Oikawa tells him, “not like my mom, or yours. Not like the other kids on the playground. Watch me, because I’m going to be great someday. I’m gonna play and play and play.” He stifles back something choked, fettered from the honesty of things, and doesn’t say anything else about the matter.
“I’m never going to pity you about anything,” Hajime says as he mashes the palm of his hand into Oikawa’s hair, “never in a million years, you idiot.” He cracks a smile before burying it away a second later. “I’m just telling you be careful about things.”
Oikawa nods, slowly, reluctantly, because he knows. He must know that Hajime is just trying to set him straight on things.
“Okay.”
x
Oikawa still ends up lying about the number of lifespans he has, anyway. When he gives the application over to the team captain, he stares over cautiously at Hajime, who’s just taken to shaking his head in the other corner of the gym.
Eyes brighten up, back to that facade, and tell Hajime, ‘it’ll all be okay.’
(And after Oikawa throws a peace sign up at him for extra reassurance, Hajime can’t resist spiking a volleyball right at the back of his head. The setter whines, shouting at him, “you could’ve killed me!” but Hajime just scoffs right back; he knows it takes more than that to kill the likes of Oikawa Tooru.)
x
They die together the next time.
The two of them suffer their untimely deaths at the bottom of the ocean, and Hajime wonders, while sinking, if there’s a worse word for drowning. Like lightning, because he really is seeing his own life flash before his eyes, he strikes at the memories that matter most—stag beetles, his mother’s mourning bracelets, Miyagi during a sunset, the flu, volleyball, the time they first connected, twenty-four to nine, Oikawa Tooru himself, the very boy drowning next to him, hands held until their last breaths—and lets himself fall blank. Hands unclasp, but not by their own fruition. Hajime imagines their whole team will make the evening news later, hurried reports between local weather and sports.
“The entire Kitagawa Daiichi Middle School Volleyball Team was tragically killed today when their bus collided with a guard railing on the cliffside, sending all twenty-two people overboard.”
Hajime’s return takes thirty minutes this time, a new record for anyone in the Iwaizumi family.
“There were no survivors.”
He clicks off the television, loosens his tie, and sits back against the wall with his head in his hands. His mother has left him a cup of tea for a small consolation, because drowning is certainly not an easy way to go by any stretch of the imagination, but Hajime doesn’t feel like drinking any of it. He tries to calm down by counting to twenty-three, thinks of the two lives he’s already lost in just under two years, and tells himself to be more careful. Twenty-three. Hajime thinks he can still lead a fulfilling existence with twenty-three lives. He counts again, right until the point where the shaking settles into nothing for him, and lets himself fall asleep for the rest of the evening.
x
When Hajime wakes up the next morning, Oikawa Tooru still has not returned.
His mother slips a mourning bracelet on his wrist on his way to school, and Oikawa’s seagreen matches perilously with the blue in his veins.
“Your skin looks pale, Hajime," she says. “Don’t worry too much. He’ll be back soon.”
Hajime fiddles with his bracelet the whole day before throwing it away that same night.
x
It takes two weeks for Oikawa to come back to the world this time, but he doesn’t have much to say about it. On the day of his resurrection, he comes straight to practice in the standard mourning suit and polished dress shoes, explains himself to the coach, switches out his black blazer for trainers and the Kitagawa Daiichi standard VBC uniform. When his first jump serve clears the net without question, he still clicks his tongue anyway, because he never, ever means to aim at the libero, but he’s done just that and it just adds to the gym’s fowl mood. Hajime thinks a team-wide death will tend to do that. A lull seems abound.
“Oikawa-kun, lookin’ sharp," the coach tells him anyway, jotting down notes on his clipboard. Hajime doesn’t feel all that well today (he swears he can still feel water filling up his nose, the phantom dizziness of losing oxygen, like a sort of dying all over again) so he’s voluntarily benched himself today with two other kids on the team. Oikawa still plays tirelessly anyway, though Hajime suspects he might still be drowning too, from the way he picks at his ears like they’re waterlogged.
Their coach says to the advisor, “he’s certainly going to be a star one day, if he keeps working the way he does.”
Hajime stares out at the court, the way Oikawa’s hands meet the ball like this is the last serve he’ll ever get to make, and holds his breath the second he slings his arm in release.
“I agree," the advisor says. “He’s growing—in power, in height, in precision. He’ll get up there one day for sure.”
Nodding curtly to himself, partially out of a feeling of I-can’t-lose-to-stupid-Eightkawa, but mostly out of something reluctantly proud, Hajime turns away from his coaches so they don’t think he’s eavesdropping. Oikawa has landed from his twentieth jump serve of the day by this time, catching himself buckling on a tired knee and charging right up towards the net, anyway.
“And it’s great, that he has the lifespan to go with it, too. Kid’s got a number in the forties, if I remember his application correctly.”
Hajime snaps his attention back to them, sees the glint in their eyes, and almost wants to laugh.
“You’ve got them fooled, huh, stupid Eightkawa?” he mumbles into the towel around his neck.
“Iwaizumi-kun?”
“Huh? Ah, yes, coach?”
“Did you say something, Iwaizumi-kun?”
Realizing the extent of his own reveries, Hajime presses the numbers out of his mind, all eights and the passing of nines, and shakes his head in a lie. “No, sir. It’s nothing," he says, reddening a little and meeting Oikawa by the eyes. It doesn’t take Hajime long to join him on the court after that, even if it’s only to practice a bit on his receives.
x
Hajime finds a genealogy of Oikawa’s ancestors one day in the winter, realizes he was never lying about the warlords or the overzealous businessmen, and finds a whole album filled with diehards, all of them gone too soon but gone in grace, nonetheless.
"Hey, just wondering," Hajime had approached Oikawa one winter day like this years ago, curious and sick of watching replays of professional European volleyball games, "why do you have so few lives?"
"That's a rude question," Oikawa had spat right back at him, pouting because that's what Oikawa does best. "And you should know the answer already."
"I find it hard to believe that your relatives left you no extra lives at all."
"Well, that's what happened."
In their current winter, too cold to run or toss the ball outside, Hajime pours over the album like a book of genesis.
Oikawa Katamori. Hajime reaches his hand over old pictures, grainy art reproductions of the daimyo in his prime, dressed to the nines in a feudal lord's garb, second only to the shogun in rank. From the local historical file: Oikawa Katamori was a tireless lord for his small, but illustrious estate, devoted to raising not only the most adept militia in the region, and also ensured more efficient farming practices and near-compulsory education standards. He died at the age of thirty, due to over-exhaustion. He left no lives for his next-of-kin.
Oikawa Chiharu. Under her spot in the album, there is an actual photograph this time, the black-and-yellowed sort all the way back from the Meiji era. She has a stern look about her, outwardly cheerless, unlike the nefariously cheery Oikawa Tooru. Under her photo rests a letter from her to a colleague: My dear friend, I regret to inform you that we still have made no progress in this iron-working project. How are we to change this country, if we cannot build from earth's treasures? I am appalled, and continue to swear myself to my research. I hear a team in Kitakyushu is close to making a breakthrough, and I refuse to be beaten.
Oikawa looks over his shoulder from his bed, resting his manual on his stomach.
"Ah, I've read hers before. Mom said she died at the age of ninety, always in the mills even until her last day. She had so many accidents that she only left two lives for the next generation. Sad, I guess," he remarks, a little too offhandedly, staring back up at his book. This sends shivers down Hajime's spine, but he forges on despite his queasiness.
Oikawa Hideo. Diet politician in the 1960's, obsessed with a crusade against corruption. Ultimately died from stress, a premature heart attack at the age of twenty-eight. Left no lives for next-of-kin.
"Apparently he was funny at holiday parties."
Oikawa Katsuro. Cartographer, adventurer. Died many times in the high mountains, in attempt to reach various summits all over the world. Dead at forty-five. Left only one life for his next-of-kin.
"Ah, that uncle used to take me sledding. Good guy."
The list goes on. Oikawa. An accomplished poet feels stifled by the upstarts in her field. Oikawa. A telegram delivery boy meets his end during s tireless search for a recipient without an address. Oikawa. The family's only florist falls from a tall tree in the Chilean rain forests in reaching for unspecified breed of tropical anemone.
Oikawa, Hajime's Oikawa, still very much alive, sits up in bed, takes the book out of the other boy's hands, and stows it back away under his mattress.
"So, it's obvious why I don't have many lives to begin with, isn't it?" Oikawa tells Hajime, slipping his bedsheets back into place. He wipes his hands clean like he's just gotten blood on them, though all Hajime sees is a thin cloud of rising dust.
Hajime still has his mind half-caught in mountain ranges and poem stanzas. "Well, your family has done some amazing stuff," he says without the usual ire he leaves for Oikawa.
"But bright things fade fast, don't you know?" Oikawa says, voice soft like he's actually found a sick fondness in all of this.
They let silence hang there for a moment, and Hajime feels the odd urge to tell Oikawa to shut up, because he is not an overachieving daimyo, or an inventor in the steel mills. Because he may be bright, brighter than anything Hajime's ever seen, he is not the lightning that brought him from ten to nine all those years ago.
Hajime says nothing of the sort, though. He is good at saying shut up. Just not the kind that will quiet the rumblings in Oikawa Tooru's crowded head.
"Well, no one ever asked you to be a poet, too," Hajime tells him. "Leave the bright stuff and the fading to people who actually write."
Oikawa actually laughs a little at this. "Yeah?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"So you wouldn't call me bright then, Iwa-chan?"
Hajime turns away when Oikawa regains a semblance of his pouting form, and finds himself simultaneously annoyed and just a bit relieved. Oikawa looms over Hajime's shoulder in turn, his mere presence teasing in itself, and bites back the urge to say, 'I think you're absolutely brilliant.'
Because frankly, he doesn't want Oikawa's head to swell even more.
Because honestly, he doesn't want to imagine losing his best friend at all.
x
Within the next year and a half, two titans come onto the court and drive Oikawa to the point of something sacrosanct.
“Why can’t we win?”
Ushijima Wakatoshi is one hundred lives' worth of brawn and relentless energy, dragging down spikes like meteors through a hapless atmosphere. He beats Kitagawa Daiichi every time, almost singlehandedly, and Hajime is left with the red missed-block marks on his forearms to prove it. Oikawa starts practicing his jump serves more after each loss—it feels like dozens after dozens each time—because he must want to feel heaven's force in his palms, too. The setter goes on and on and on like this, until he can barely stand and his eyes blip open and closed in weariness. Sometimes, Hajime thinks the sweat lining Oikawa's collar looks like it's choking him.
“My name is Kageyama Tobio, and I came from Akiyama Elementary School. I’ve been playing volleyball since the second grade. It’s a pleasure to work with you!”
Kageyama Tobio is another story. He is not a god yet, but has the makings of one, graced with a respectable fifty lives and a genius's touch for the ball. He looks breathless every time his fingers are about to make contact, and in the split second Hajime glances over at Oikawa, he knows he can see it, too. Hajime is actually rather taken with how effortless the ball looks in Kageyama's hands, and how he never rests on his laurels despite his talent, but Oikawa looks at him like an open wound, a pestilence on the upper court.
At this, Oikawa starts running six days a week instead of four. He saves his strongest serves for after-dark practices, when Kageyama can't see, and leaves every session with an overcast's worth of bruises. Hajime tries to look after him at every turn, but he knows he can't stop Oikawa completely—because for all the gods he's trying to trounce, Oikawa has become one in his own right, too. Hajime feels this with every outgrown centimeter, every slammed serve, every captain's call, a voice no longer a child's. Oikawa himself has yet to look in a mirror.
"You're overworking yourself!"
Still, these changes doesn't scare Hajime that much. Golden boys are forged by lightning strikes, fleeting and gone in a solitary flash, but Hajime has no intentions of letting Oikawa disappear that fast. He refuses to let Oikawa fade alone.
x
These days, when Oikawa runs in the mornings, he chooses paths facing away from the sunrise.
x
“You’re overworking yourself,” Hajime drones on once more, when Oikawa skips lunch to practice again.
The setter doesn’t listen this time either, but that doesn’t mean Hajime will stop trying.
x
“You’re overworking yourself.”
“Iwa-chan, don’t worry so much! You’ll get wrinkles if you keep doting on me.” Oikawa’s words are the sweet kind, but the way they leave his mouth tastes like venom. His laugh is halfhearted, and his serve strikes the court with zero command.
x
"Oikawa-san! Please show me how to serve!"
Kageyama is bright-eyed and eager. He has no idea that Oikawa only wants to smite him.
The palm of Oikawa's hand almost meets Kageyama's cheek that day, but it never does because Hajime's there to stop it. With all the restraint in the world, bursting at the seams, he tells Kageyama to go home, calm like athird year should be (‘Sorry,’ Oikawa had said to Kageyama in turn, trapped in waves of his own making, his own disbelief, but hardly composed at all) and lets himself unravel when he's alone with Oikawa. There's a bunch of scolding on Hajime's end, more vehement than usual, and Oikawa clenches his fists and throws his head up into the air in telling him off, too.
“There’s no way I can have composure! I want to win, I want to go to nationals!”
No, well, Hajime knows it’s not just at him—but the sight of Oikawa screaming, voice still lulled somewhat, smooth, like a pretty sort of storm, still pisses Hajime off.
“‘I’ this, ‘I’ that. It’s annoying!”
Hajime slams his head into Oikawa’s nose and sends the weary setter back on the floor. “Do you think you’re fighting by yourself?” He is his own storm, by now. “You’ve got to be kidding, you dumbass!”
Oikawa doesn’t say anything. Hajime reaches for him by the shirt collar. “If you think how you’re doing equals how the team will do, I’ll punch you!”
“You already did!”
“There’s no one on our team who can beat Ushiwaka one-on-one!” Hajime drags Oikawa closer to him. “But there are six players on a volleyball court!”
And like someone finding their reveries for the first time, Oikawa finds the will to actually laugh, and Hajime lightens his grip on him altogether. He begins to wonder if he hit Oikawa too hard, or if he’s finally succombing to the fatigue, but Oikawa ends up standing tall on his own, beaming up at the ceiling lights like he’s discovered a galaxy on his own.
"Hey, sorry, did I headbutt you too hard?" Hajime asks, face relaxing into a mere frown. Worried, actually, even if he'll only half-admit it.
Oikawa keeps laughing, light as air itself. Hajime stands up too, wobbly-kneed and trembling, not quite reaching the same heights Oikawa does, but he feels the same release nonetheless. In his own place among mortals, he thinks that the sky between them is a short one, anyway.
"I suddenly feel invincible.”
Hajime stares on, feels the sky between them lengthen for just a second, and lets it fall into the stratosphere he's always, always shared with Oikawa. Oikawa, tired like any boy would be at this point, slumps his head against Hajime's shoulder and presses another laugh into his jacket, spurts of nosebleed staining the cloth. After a while, a small minute stretched into infinity, Hajime feels Oikawa's weight shift onto him until he's keeping him up altogether. Hajime lets the weight of both of them buckle underneath him, settled and all sorts of relieved. He won't admit that he feels like crying about this.
"More importantly, Iwa-chan, is dumbass the only insult you know?" Oikawa asks, at peace.
"Do you want to bleed from the other nostril, too?" Hajime asks right back, wanting to laugh. Just as Oikawa lets himself settle into the nape of his best friend's neck, breathing slowing into the verge of sleep, Hajime tells himself not to get pulled into it, too. One of them has to stay awake.
"Say, Iwa-chan?"
"What is it now, Eightkawa?"
"Well, that's just it," Oikawa sighs. "I think I'll need a new nickname, soon."
Hajime lets a hand settle on Oikawa's back, fingers curled over the split of his spine. At this point, he does let himself cry, even if the tears never leave the pit of his eyes. He sniffs back, nods, and knows this was coming all along. Hajime thinks of the Oikawa family album under the mattress, the way Oikawa's breath catches with each hard-fought serve, the way he almost stumbles over himself during runs sometimes, when he thinks no one's watching. Of course Oikawa had worked himself to the brink, to the bone.
"Hey, Iwa-chan?"
Hajime holds his ground. "Yeah?" He doesn't feel right, calling his best friend Sevenkawa already. There's no point mourning games that haven't been lost yet, and he thinks it's the same with lives he's about to lose, too.
"What does it feel like, when you go?"
Hajime scoffs, clearing his throat. "Like you don't know? We've both done this before."
"No, I mean...when you...you know," Oikawa clarifies. "What's it like for you?"
"Oh, that." Hajime nods. "Ah, well. I guess it feels like falling asleep. People say that's what it's like, usually."
Oikawa hums pleasantly, his whole body limp against Hajime's at this point, the rhythm of his breath steady and at ease. Hajime would normally shove him off, but he doesn't this time.
"You know what's funny?" Oikawa asks. "It's never felt that way to me. I think this might be the first time it’s ever felt like sleeping to me. It's nice."
"Really? How does it feel like then, for you?" Hajime asks him. He gives a gentle tug just slightly at the end of Oikawa's hair, teasing almost, because Hajime is capable of that, too.
Oikawa laughs, before gathering his final thoughts.
"Like I've been electrocuted," Oikawa tells Hajime, neither sullen or with any sort of whimsy. A kind of in-between. "Like, there's so much left to do, so many places to reach, and I haven't gotten to any of it yet. That's what it feels like."
Hajime shakes his head. He feels his cheek, burning hot and sticky with tears, brushed up against Oikawa's cold skin.
"Dumbass," he tells Oikawa. "You've always got tomorrow."
"Hm, I guess so. I do, don't I?"
"Yeah." Hajime nods this time. "Everything will be better tomorrow."
"All right."
"Guess I better go now, right? It's hard to stay awake."
"Go to sleep, Sevenkawa."
"Good night, Hajime."
And when Oikawa Tooru does go this time, the rise and fall of his chest sinking into nothingness altogether, Hajime can't help but feel a world of relief. He traces Oikawa's spine again, says a small prayer for a safe passage back, and leaves him for the heavens to collect him.
Hajime, co-captain of the Kitagawa Daiichi volleyball team, is the one to lock up the second gymnasium that night. He turns the key, wipes off the tears, and tells himself about the promise of the next day.
x
Oikawa does come back the next day, nose fortunately unbroken, spirits raised. He's already in the gym by the time Hajime gets there in the morning, in the throes of practicing his tosses with some second years, but there's nothing strained about the way he connects with his sets today; for all the times Hajime has called Kageyama beautiful with the ball, he thinks Oikawa looks absolutely mythic this morning, fingers adept with rediscovered grace. Even the sweat on his face beads with something pretty. Whatever it is, Hajime's glad Oikawa has found his finesse again, because the self-doubt was wearing thin on his patience, anyway.
"Hey. Give me the ball next," Hajime tells Oikawa, slipping his knee pads into place and grounding himself on the court.
Oikawa blinks twice, shows just the slightest inkling of something bashful (Hajime thinks an honest heart to heart will do that to a person) before regaining form. He smirks, actually has the nerve to bat his eyelashes, like he’s been reborn to flirt, and watches Hajime devolve into something disgusted.
“The usual?” he asks, hugging the ball to his stomach like a friend he’s made up with.
Hajime nods. “A little higher this time. Your past couple of tosses have been a little low.”
“Oh, but you always end up hitting them anyway, right, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa chuckles. “But I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks for telling me.”
“Yeah, no problem, but enough with the chit-chat. I wanna spike already.”
“Got it, Iwa-chan," Oikawa actually singsongs. Hajime clenches his fists for another punch to the gut, but he secretly presses the liveliness to his heart.
x
That first spike feels clean and complete in Hajime’s hands, like an orbit caught in perfect alignment.
After slamming it down, he nods over to Oikawa with a small nod, to which the setter just smiles back with a squint in his eyes. It is not feigned, but oddly breathless, caught up in something the wing-spiker can’t place immediately; and just when Hajime tells himself to tear away, he comes up with the word for it, one he wouldn’t be certain of if Oikawa Tooru wasn’t his best friend.
Caught up in something thankful.
It disappears after a second, because that’s what Oikawa is good at—shifting from mask to mask, devilish smiles to whistling grins, spacey wonder to something much, much more focused on the court—but Hajime knows. He can’t not know.
With another toss, Oikawa hones in on the spin, pushes forward with a jump into the air, and breathes out with a laugh, free and aching to keep finding this sort of forever. Hajime accepts the ball, slams it down with everything he has, and lets himself run away with the imaginary words in his head.
‘Thank you, Iwa-chan.’
Oikawa comes over, offers a hand to slap in a high-five, and tells Hajime, “nice job.” His palm lingers much too long on his shoulder next, like Oikawa wants to pull Hajime in for a secret, something he won’t dare tell anyone else, but he ends up saying nothing. He loses that smile of his for a moment, laughs at something Hajime doesn’t understand, and heads back up to his place on the upper court.
Hajime keeps still on the hardwood, shakes off the unexplained and slight warmth rising on the small of his back, and wonders if he’s not just imagining things, after all.
x
“You know, Iwa-chan, my third death was in your arms," Oikawa says, under the same umbrella on the way home because Hajime forgot his. “Isn’t that just romantic?”
Hajime kicks him in the back with the grimy side of his shoe.
“Hey, Oikawa," Hajime calls out.
“Yeeees?”
“You’re pretty warped, aren’t you?”
With this, Oikawa just laughs and lets Hajime have a little more of the umbrella. Hajime would rather walk in the goddamned rain.
x
At their last middle school tournament in the Sendai Gymnasium, they don’t win against Shiratorizawa, but they take one of the sets and the best setter’s award, in turn. Oikawa accepts it with shaking hands, bowing graciously to the presenter, and stands back next to Hajime in the lineup. He smiles, but Hajime suspects, no, knows, that his happiness is only mostly sincere, because they’ve still got summits to reach and second places to burn.
During retirement speeches, Oikawa confesses to the entire team that he only has seven lives to live. ‘I’ve been lying about my number all this time.’ He bows, low, lower than when he was receiving the award, like an apology he doesn’t want to owe in words. Some of the underclassmen look at him in disdain. The coaches whisper on and write things in their clipboards, probably because they have things to discuss with Seijou, later. Others, like Kageyama Tobio, look on reluctantly like Oikawa’s just reached the highest pillar.
Hajime looks on, glances cast at all of their reactions. Lastly, he stares over at Oikawa, sees someone who’s found some semblance of relief, and lets himself be satisfied with that.
And when they walk home, the last time from the Kitagawa Daiichi volleyball club, Oikawa cries the entire way.
“Oh, come on, Sevenkawa.”
“Iwa-chan!”
And unlike their ceremony in the Sendai Gymnasium, Hajime doesn’t feel the same need to do the same. There’s no need to cry this time. He just takes Oikawa’s hand, yanks him forward so no one sees how ugly he actually cries, and tells him that a new day is coming.
They’re always, always coming.